【英文原著类】The Boys’ Life of Abraham Lincoln(亚伯拉罕·林肯的孩提时代).pdf

The Boys' Life of Abraham Lincoln
The Boys' Life of
Abraham Lincoln
Helen Nicolay
1
The Boys' Life of Abraham Lincoln
I. A PRESIDENT'S CHILDHOOD
Abraham Lincoln's forefathers were pioneers--men who left their
homes to open up the wilderness and make the way plain for others to
follow them. For one hundred and seventy years, ever since the first
American Lincoln came from England to Massachusetts in 1638, they had
been moving slowly westward as new settlements were made in the forest.
They faced solitude, privation, and all the dangers and hardships that beset
men who take up their homes where only beasts and wild men have had
homes before; but they continued to press steadily forward, though they
lost fortune and sometimes even life itself, in their westward progress.
Back in Pennsylvania and New Jersey some of the Lincolns had been men
of wealth and influence. In Kentucky, where the future President was born
on February 12, 1809, his parents lived in deep poverty Their home was a
small log cabin of the rudest kind, and nothing seemed more unlikely than
that their child, coming into the world in such humble surroundings, was
destined to be the greatest man of his time. True to his race, he also was to
be a pioneer--not indeed, like his ancestors, a leader into new woods and
unexplored fields, but a pioneer of a nobler and grander sort, directing the
thoughts of men ever toward the right, and leading the American people,
through difficulties and dangers and a mighty war, to peace and freedom.
The story of this wonderful man begins and ends with a tragedy, for
his grandfather, also named Abraham, was killed by a shot from an
Indian's rifle while peaceably at work with his three sons on the edge of
their frontier clearing. Eighty-one years later the President himself met
death by an assassin's bullet. The murderer of one was a savage of the
forest; the murderer of the other that far more cruel thing, a savage of
civilization.
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